


Dark Spots

by Jemisard



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Past Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-27
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-29 10:23:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6371107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jemisard/pseuds/Jemisard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some of the dark spots in eleven years on the run.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dark Spots

In the eleven years or so that Bruce had been on the run, he’d been caught eight times by the Army.

Most of them happened at the beginning, when he was still learning to vanish and stay hidden in a crowd, even if he didn’t look like anyone around him. It was a set of skills he didn’t have, not really, not for being discreet and subtle and pulling his whole presence in.

And the fear made it a bit harder to stay hidden. They’d get too near, he’d get scared and the Other Guy would rear his head, leaving Bruce to start over again, somewhere new and just as unfamiliar.

Five of those times, Bruce was only nominally aware of the fact he had been technically in military custody. His fear had been too overwhelming, his self preservation kicking up his heartbeat until he blacked out to the squeal of metal and the scream of men facing their deaths.

But later, Bruce had had more control. At least once, he had handed himself in, after a rampage through Colombia left a schoolhouse demolished and his guilt too strong to live with. He had found the gun, handled it awkwardly when he had pressed it into his mouth and up against the soft palette, eyes closed as he squeezed the trigger.

He came to with shards of memory, of pain and rage, the taste of the bullet in his mouth and Hulk beating trees and rocks and screaming his name over and over like a death threat and promise in one.

Contacting Ross had been logical. The only promise of stopping the endless cycle of loss and murder and guilt. The older man had sneered at him when they came to collect him, binding him in manacles that were heavy for his thin form, pumping him full of sedatives to keep him calm against the unwanted fear.

He wanted to be there. But it still scared him.

It was almost like a Hulk out. Things were indistinct and hazy, seen through a fog that he couldn’t get out of.

But there was pain. He knew that. Sharp and clear as the fog wasn’t. He screamed a lot, sometimes just to voice the pain, but he was sure there were times he screamed for his mother, begged her to stop it like he had when he was a little boy and he still thought his mom could save him from the world.

The soldiers laughed in his lucid moments, when he knew they were there and that they had heard him beg for his mother. He felt no shame, he couldn’t anymore, too numb to humiliation through the drugs, through the tests and probes and dehumanisation of his treatment.

He never remembered breaking free. He still didn’t know how he had got out, just that at some point it was pain and vomiting up blood and bile and sometime later he was lying on his back and watching brilliant stars flicker in and out of sight as the night breeze stirred the trees around him.

It hadn’t stopped the guilt. But he never went back voluntarily again. He didn’t know how many innocent soldiers he had killed in wiping out the dangers, how many civilians got caught up in his fury.

He had gone to Cambodia that time, to steep in the killing fields where farmers still turned up bones with every harvest and plough and the country carried enough guilt to make Bruce feel a little bit normal.


End file.
